Night (memoir)

Night is a 1956 memoir by Elie Wiesel, recounting his experiences alongside his father in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps during the final years of World War II in Europe. The extent to which the book is strictly factual remains debated; Wiesel described it as his deposition, yet scholars have found it challenging to treat as a straightforward, unembellished account. It is widely regarded as a foundational work of Holocaust literature.

Wiesel traces his loss of religious faith and growing disillusionment with humanity, beginning in the Nazi-established ghetto of his hometown, Sighet, Romania, and continuing through his transfer between camps. The typical parent-child dynamic reverses as his father weakens into helplessness, leaving Wiesel, then a teenager, to care for him. His father died in January 1945, taken to the crematory after suffering from dysentery and a beating, while Wiesel lay silently on the bunk above, afraid of being beaten himself. The memoir concludes shortly after the U.S. Army liberated Buchenwald in April 1945.

After the war, Wiesel moved to Paris. In 1954, he completed an 862-page Yiddish manuscript about his experiences, which was edited down to 245 pages and published in Argentina in 1956 as *Un di velt hot geshvign* (meaning "And the World Remained Silent"). With help from novelist François Mauriac, he secured a French publisher. In 1958, Les Éditions de Minuit released a 178-page version, *La Nuit*, edited by Jérôme Lindon, presented as a fragmented narrative. An English translation of the French text, titled *Night*, was published in 1960 by Hill & Wang in New York, running 116 pages.

*Night* has been translated into 30 languages. Literary critic Ruth Franklin observed that the pruning from Yiddish to French transformed an angry historical chronicle into a work of art. It is the first book in a trilogy—*Night*, *Dawn*, *Day*—which, according to Jewish tradition of beginning a new day at nightfall, marks Wiesel’s passage from darkness to light. Wiesel said of *Night*: "I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end—man, history, literature, religion, God. There was nothing left. And yet we begin again with night."

**Background**

Elie Wiesel was born on 30 September 1928 in Sighet, a Carpathian mountain town in northern Transylvania (now Romania), to Chlomo Wiesel, a shopkeeper, and his wife Sarah (née Feig). They lived among 10,000 to 20,000 mostly Orthodox Jews. Northern Transylvania had been annexed by Hungary in 1940, and restrictions on Jews were already in place, but the period Wiesel describes at the book’s start, 1941–1943, was relatively calm.

That changed at midnight on Saturday, 18 March 1944, when Nazi Germany invaded Hungary, and SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest to oversee the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in German-occupied Poland. From 5 April, Jews over six had to wear a 10 x 10 cm yellow badge on the upper-left side of their coats. They had to declare their property, were forbidden from moving, traveling, owning cars or radios, listening to foreign stations, or using telephones. Jewish authors could no longer be published, their books were removed from libraries, and Jewish civil servants, journalists, and lawyers were dismissed.

As the Allies prepared for Europe’s liberation, mass deportations began at a rate of four trains daily from Hungary to Auschwitz, each carrying about 3,000 people. Between 15 May and 8 July 1944, 437,402 Hungarian Jews were recorded as sent there on 147 trains, most gassed on arrival. These transports included most of the Jewish population outside Budapest. From 16 May to 27 June, 131,641 Jews were deported from northern Transylvania. Wiesel, his parents, and his sisters—older sisters Hilda and Beatrice, and seven-year-old Tzipora—were among them. Upon arrival, Jews were "selected": sent left meant forced labor; right meant the gas chamber. Sarah and Tzipora were sent to the gas chamber. Hilda and Beatrice survived, separated from the family. Wiesel and Chlomo stayed together, enduring forced labor and a death march to Buchenwald, near Weimar. Chlomo died there in January 1945, three months before the U.S. Army’s 6th Armored Division liberated the camp.

**Synopsis**

*Night* opens in Sighet in 1941. The narrator, Eliezer, is an Orthodox Jewish teenager who studies the Talmud by day and at night "weep[s] over the destruction of the Temple." Against his father’s wishes, he discusses Kabbalah with Moshe the Beadle, caretaker of the Hasidic shtiebel.

In June 1941, the Hungarian government expelled Jews who could not prove citizenship. Moshe is crammed onto a cattle train and taken to Poland. He escapes, believing God saved him so he might save Sighet’s Jews. He returns to tell his "story of his own death," running from house to house: "Jews, listen to me! It’s all I ask of you. No money. No pity. Just listen to me!" He recounts that when the train crossed into Poland, the Gestapo took over. The Jews were transferred to trucks, driven to a forest in Galicia near Kolomay, and forced to dig pits. Each prisoner then approached the hole, presented his neck, and was shot. Babies were thrown into the air and used as targets by machine gunners. He tells of Malka, a young girl who took three days to die, and Tobias, the tailor who begged to be killed.